Hacker News Reader

openclon Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05%

The hardware support is purely a function of the decision of this specific project to only target newer graphics APIs. The Ocarina of Time decomp for example supports older PC hardware through OpenGL and has also been ported to Dreamcast.

openclon Ned: ImGui Text Editor with GL Shaders

It's actually not even 60. The FPS target is configurable in the settings and for some reason the default is 57.

openclon Steam Machine

Given the memory configuration it seems extremely unlikely that it's socketed. It's certainly not AM5.

openclon ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk

The document editing portion just uses Collabora which is based on Libreoffice.

openclon AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

The Strix Halo GPU is roughly around RTX 4060 (laptop version) performance.

Phoronix just doesn't do much mobile dGPU testing in general to have any data to compare with there.

openclon The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

The best thing about Renpy is that the text rendering actually looks good, which is true of shockingly few VN engines even today.

Especially when you increase the window size or run fullscreen, most VN engines just render the whole game at a fixed resolution and upscale it up but Renpy makes the framebuffer match the window size and renders text at the full resolution.

openclon Show HN: Game Bub – open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld

It's been done before. Lots of 90s bootleg consoles used clones of the Famicom/NES chips, though they weren't particularly accurate clones. The Commodore 64 Direct-To-TV of all things had a custom ASIC made for it in 2004.

I think these days FPGAs have just gotten cheap enough that the economics of making custom chips doesn't make much sense for the volumes these kinds of products tend to sell.

openclon Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting

Because nobody makes 24V power supplies for computers, they'd have to convince the whole industry to agree on new PSU standards.

openclon The DeskThing: the perfect desk assistant

The actual Car Thing runs Linux on an Amlogic S905D2 (quad Cortex A53) with 512MB RAM/4GB flash and an 800x480 screen. So you could do something similar with pretty much any random cheap ARM SBC.

openclon American WWII bomb explodes at Japanese airport, causing large crater in taxiway

The airport was built in 1943.

openclon In 1870, Lord Rayleigh used oil and water to calculate the size of molecules

The actual manuscript from Rayleigh [1] explains it better: the area is the entire area of the vessel the oil was placed in, and the thing actually being measured was how much oil was required for it cover the whole area.

[1] https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/old_lite...

openclon I designed a Dieter Rams-inspired iPhone dock

I've heard people claim this but never seen any actual evidence of license violations.

Everything seems perfectly in order with both the Linux-based firmware on the X1C[0] and their slicer[1] which is a fork of Prusaslicer.

[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/open-source-s...

[1] https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio

openclon AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors are ready to deliver world class gaming

You can always just change the power limits in the BIOS settings.

openclon Soviet Calculator History (1998)

No die shots but the Wikipedia articles of all things on the MK61 and MK52 are surprisingly thorough including photos of the PCBs, schematics, and the External Links sections contain most of the interesting articles I'm aware of about these.

They're quite interesting and quirky machines, definitely HP-inspired but unique in a lot of ways. Especially the MK52 with the built in EEPROM (though other than the EEPROM and connector for an external ROM it is functionally identical to the MK61). They're also still readily available and cheap on eBay if you want to play with one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-52

openclon Vintage Wooden Homes on Wheels: Photos of Mobile Living from Early 20th Century

Most of these couldn't move fast enough for aerodynamics to matter much. A Ford Model TT truck had a top speed of 15mph without a house attached to it.

openclon 40 years later, a game for the ZX Spectrum will be again broadcast over FM radio

The format is very simple, basically a square wave with different pulse widths for 1s and 0s [1]. Spectrum software was typically sold on audio cassettes and the radio broadcasts are the exact same format, typically people would record the broadcasts to cassette. The loader program in ROM just copies all the data from tape (or radio) into RAM so yes any game logic would be included in that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_software

openclon OpenBSD KDE Plasma Desktop

OpenBSD out of the box is an extremely minimal setup compared to the default install of most Linux distros.

A lot of the security of the default install comes from minimizing the attack surface by having very few services running. So you do not need to be tech-savvy to make it secure, but you might need to be tech-savvy to turn it into a usable system for your use case.

openclon Firefox Sync actually works

They posted an article a while ago with a high level overview of how FF Sync encryption works, but the TL;DR is that the key for E2EE is derived from your account password.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

openclon Who makes the most reliable new cars?

This CR report is about the reliability of new cars over the first year of ownership. The correlation to how many issues there will be 10, 15, 20 years down the line is rather tenuous.

openclon Sopwith – a classic bi-plane shoot 'em up from 1984 in the browser

The "Red Baron" version was just from a company that sold freeware games and changed all the names presumably hoping that nobody would notice.

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Strike_F...

openclon PostgreSQL on S390x

You can indeed get S390X VMs from IBM cloud, either running z/OS or Linux:

https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/vpc?topic=vpc-vs-profiles&interfa...

openclon A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

You can still buy house plans and bundles of parts similar to what Sears used to offer, Menards sells them.

Home Depot also has some prefab units but they're all very small.

openclon Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 Series Makes for a Great Linux Laptop

Phoronix already did an article comparing the M2 running Asahi with Zen 4 machines.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-zen4-mobile

openclon Blender 4.0 release notes

Does Flamenco[1] not meet your requirements? Technically not built in but it gives a button right in the Blender UI to send render jobs to remote machines.

[1] https://flamenco.blender.org/

openclon Black goo is the new oscilloscope: Love Hultén's ferrofluid synths

Ferrofluid has been used in certain high end speakers for quite a while, it can break down or dry out eventually but generally lasts well over a decade in that application.

The glass treatment is just to prevent the ferrofluid from sticking.

openclon Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium

Lithium isn't scarce relative to current demand levels but if the automotive industry wants to transition to 100% EVs that's an enormous increase in demand.

openclon Car Owners Fall Behind on Payments at Highest Rate on Record

The base price of a Civic has gone from $18,190 in 2014[1] to $23,950 today[2]. That's 30% which pretty much exactly matches the official CPI inflation numbers.

[1] https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-automobiles/releases/relea...

[2] https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-automobiles/releases/relea...

openclon Intel Xeon Max 9480 Deep-Dive 64GB HBM2e Onboard Like a GPU or AI Accelerator

According to this paper[0] ~1600GB/s raw memory bandwidth, ~590GB/s in practice. I haven't seen any actual benchmarks of M2 Ultra CPU bandwidth, but the M1 Ultra has been benchmarked at ~240GB/s[1].

[0] https://www.ixpug.org/images/docs/ISC23/McCalpin_SPR_BW_limi...

[1] https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2022/20220618_1934-Appl...